Los Angeles may resemble a war zone, with thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines deployed in response to widespread anti-immigration raid protests, but the Trump White House reportedly couldn’t be happier about the politics of the situation.
“We couldn’t have scripted this better,” a senior White House aide told The Atlantic of the dynamic inside the Oval Office. “It’s like the 2024 election never ended: Trump is strong while Democrats are weak and defending the indefensible.”
Trump insiders reportedly believe that the images of the protests, which have featured both large-scale peaceful demonstrations and multiple days of violence against police and immigration officers, as well as protesters burning vehicles and holding Mexican flags, play into the administration’s message. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently claimed Democrats are weak on law and order, while alleging most immigrants are violent national security threats, despite data showing the opposite.
“This is what America voted for, period,” a Trump adviser told NBC News. “This is the America First focus that got the president elected and is driven by nothing else than what he promised American voters.”
“Look at the violence, the attacks on law enforcement,” the adviser added. “If Democrats want to support that, let them. This is why we win elections and they do not.”
Trump has long valorized the military and called for them to form part of an aggressive response to civil unrest, reportedly sparring with his first term Defense Secretary Mark Esper over his opposition to sending active-duty troops to counter 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and allegedly asking if troops could “shoot them in the legs or something.”
During his first term, Trump ultimately deferred to state governors on whether to call up National Guard troops to respond to the 2020 protests, and governors in 32 states and Washington, D.C., ultimately did.
This time around, Trump does not want to appeal to local leaders and is forging ahead on his own, including federalizing the California National Guard over the wishes of Los Angeles and state leaders, who have sued.
“Trump seems super intent on a very different path now, with a serious show of righteous force to protect American lives and property,” Steve Cortes, a longtime Trump adviser, told Politico.
Another key force for the military-led response has been White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner who has repeatedly accused California officials of being in open rebellion against the government and its migration policies, a potential prelude to the White House invoking the emergency Insurrection Act.
"Stephen has been clear in all the meetings: More military, faster," a Trump adviser told Axios.
Top Democrats in California have accused the Trump administration of deliberately trying to provoke a crisis as a means to seize more power, first with heavy-duty immigration raids and then by invoking emergency powers to send military troops in to respond to the protests that followed.
“Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a nationally televised speech Tuesday evening. “But they do not stop there. Trump and his loyalists thrive on division because it allows them to take more power and exert even more control.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, meanwhile, has said the White House is using the crisis as a lab “experiment.”
“This is chaos that was started in Washington,” Bass said Monday during a press conference.
An outlier in his party, Senator John Fetterman has accused his fellow Democrats of losing “the moral high ground” over the crisis by what he said was a refusal to “condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement.”
Democratic leaders have generally condemned the violence and called for peaceful protest, while being sharply critical of the Trump administration’s response.
The Los Angeles crisis has also likely provided a welcome distraction from last week’s major political scandal, the acrimonious public split between Trump and his former top ally, Elon Musk, who savaged the president’s Big, Beautiful Bill spending package and accused Trump of being tied to the Jeffrey Epstein pedophilia scandal.
In recent days, Trump and Musk have signaled they could be open to a reconciliation.
